The names were a litany of pain, each one a wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding. For most of them, she had no way of knowing if they were dead or slaves. She could promise them vengeance, but she already knew she couldn’t keep that promise. She was a prisoner – a thing. If nothing else, the brands on her shoulders, which had cut their way through the tattoos there, were reminder enough.

And Ilandeh! Xessa ground her teeth together and thought of all the ways she’d hurt the woman when next they met. That was one promise she was making, because it didn’t bind the spirits of the dead to the flesh world until it was fulfilled. She’d kill Ilandeh, slowly and inventively. For Toxte, vanished in the dawn and the battle. For Tayan and Lilla, captives. For the betrayal of the Sky City and the deaths of thousands. Ilandeh was responsible for it all and Ilandeh would pay in ways she couldn’t even imagine. Ways Xessa couldn’t yet imagine.

The fantasy was all that kept her going through the days of her incarceration. The slaves or servants or whatever they were who brought her food and took away her waste had quickly learnt to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke. Only the slanting light through the cracks in the heavy wood door told the passage of days. She’d spent the first three lying still, refusing food and waiting for her dead to come and prise her loose from her skin. She picked at the threads stitching her spirit to her flesh, seeking death, drumming the death rite with her hands on the packed dirt floor. She didn’t die.

On the fourth she woke crying, reaching for the soft warmth of Ossa and not finding him. They’d tied him like a turkey for slaughter and that’s probably what had happened; she didn’t know. She hadn’t seen a single dog since the city fell and his absence was a missing limb. Half her heart. In the deep, animal corner of Xessa’s spirit, it hurt more than losing her home, her people, or her liberty.

On the fifth day she woke from a dream of Toxte. He was angry with her and she couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear to think of his spirit on the spiral path raging at her. She gave in to him and to living and began to eat, to move around the small empty room where she was kept, practising her fighting forms until her skin beaded with sweat and she stank. More days passed and she became used to her own smell and that of the pail where she pissed and shitted.